Gentrification is typically
discussed abstractly, and presented as an urban social evil. Yet gentrification
is a highly material process, and current gentrification in Chicago is
transforming the demography and face of the city. The purpose of this
collection will be to document gentrification as process and show the very
material ways in which people’s lives are affected and reshaped. Archaeologists
and urban planners focus on the spaces in which people live and have lived, and
this collection will allow for an intriguing contemporary archaeology,
situating current trends within broader histories of human settlement and
population movements. The collection will not offer a value statement on
gentrification, but rather explore it as a historically situated practice and examine
its effects. By rendering this often abstract idea in material terms, we hope
to re-insert people into the process, and to create space for a dialogue about
people, the landscape, and changes in the spaces where we live. In addition,
this collection can be a productive starting point for dialogue about the
city’s history of segregation and racial tensions.
This
collection will enhance the Field’s existing collections and is compatible with
the organization’s mission. The Field “is an educational
institution concerned with the diversity and relationships in nature and among
cultures. It provides collection-based research and learning for greater public
understanding and appreciation of the world in which we live.”[1]
Collecting artifacts related to contemporary gentrification in Chicago offers a
material basis for discussions of relationships between communities within the city,
valuing diversity by bringing this topic into public view rather than allowing
it to be an undiscussed and unacknowledged byproduct of privilege and class
difference. In addition, the collection proposed here will be acquired with
community involvement and input, in line with the museum’s commitment to
collaborative collecting. The gentrification collection also neatly aligns with
the mission of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change in fostering
dialogue between different Chicago communities. It also simultaneously documents
for posterity the massive population shifts within the city. These population
shifts also result in expansion or redirection of infrastructural projects,
thereby changing the physical and natural landscape of the city and the ways in
which Chicago residents interact with it. In exhibiting this broad base of
impact, the collection will be relevant for all residents as well as developing
broad-based understanding about gentrification as a general process, which
occurs in many places throughout the world.
Research
performed on this collection could further existing scholarship in a number of
areas, and I propose a series of successive interpretive frames for understanding
the collection. To ground the exhibition, we can begin with analysis of the
material and tangible drawn from archaeological theory. Research on this
proposed collection would further an understanding of commodities and commodity
chains by tracing the “social lives” of material objects in homes as those
homes move (Appadurai, 1986) and offering archaeological insights in the
tradition of the chaîne opératoire. While
using a culture history approach can describe these materials, “it cannot
account for either stability or change” so it will be important to incorporate
a processual approach as well (Berger, 95). A processual lens can shed light on
trends in historic preservation and new construction to nuance understandings
of how people’s homes, as private spaces, shift according to the city’s
political economic context. This collection can also be productively understood
through a Marxist framework, exploring how class conflict through the material.
Simultaneously, symbolic and semiotic approaches can help nuance how audiences
interpret these objects on display, and highlight the ways that the objects
carry multiple meanings and valences for different constituencies.
In addition, the
data generated will contribute to scholarly discussions of human geography,
migration, and resettlement on a micro-scale and deepen anthropological
knowledge about cities. The material record, combined with the ethnographic
record in oral histories, will allow for a deeper understanding of the very
real ways in which Chicago residents’ lives are impacted by these shifts. Furthermore,
by analyzing the resituating of workers, schools, and businesses, the
collection offers policy makers vital information about their constituents and
suggestions for improvements to transportation infrastructures and public works
based upon these redistributed demographies.
On
display, the collections will represent how human societies change over time, a
primary preoccupation of anthropology. As an exhibition, the collection could
also debunk myths about Chicago residents (on both sides of gentrification) and
help foster communication about class in America, hopefully sparking dialogue
and progress here in Chicago. Furthermore, the collection will show a material
record of the historical processes of change that are transforming Chicago as a
city, contributing to the Field’s ongoing documentation of these changes,
beginning with the Chicago World’s Fair, to the shuttering of the steel mills,
to today’s changing urban demography.[2]
By putting the exhibition on display, it is highly likely that the Field will
attract new audiences from the Chicago area, as well as develop fruitful new
partnerships with Chicago-area schools, urban planners, and local politicians.
The particular
types of objects should be selected in coordination with people on both sides
of these demographic shifts. One method could be to collect artifacts and
representative objects, decor and furniture to recreate and stage rooms in
homes (which the Brooklyn Museum has done for various historical periods[3]),
showing the contrast between previous living spaces and the new ones. In this
way, we can attempt to showcase the materiality and spatiality of these
changes. A more robust description of items to be collected would be developed
in collaboration with residents impacted by gentrification (both incoming and
outgoing). While we can predict some objects and ways in which to present this
phenomenon, we seek vital knowledge, experience, and input from our community.
In addition to
those objects described above, the collection could feasibly include oral
histories of former and current residents and small business owners; images, murals
and objects from public housing projects; archival and current photographs;
news reports; legal codes and zoning regulations; demographic maps by class and
race[4];
blueprints for homes and neighborhoods; and transportation/commute maps to work
and school.[5] Some
of the “objects” for the collections are easily obtained, such as news reports,
maps, etc, because these objects pose an issue of copyright and reproduction,
rather than physical purchase and acquisition.
In
consultation with the related communities, the Field can present the exhibition
using polyvocal interpretive strategies. By including, for example, audio clips
of a former resident describing her sentiments toward her previous resident
alongside urban planners’ commentary about why they arranged those spaces in a
particular way, we can present multiple perspectives on the same object or display,
thereby showcasing semiotic and symbolic approaches in our exhibition strategy.
We can also link to other similar objects in the Field’s other exhibitions, by
noting function and encouraging cross-contextual comparison as a method of
demonstrating how the affiliated meanings of objects vary by context.
In
sum, a collection centered around gentrification would contribute to scholarly
research on urban populations, cities, homes and private spaces, political
economic processes, urban planning, and archaeology. By using archaeological,
semiotic and symbolic approaches in display, the Field can nuance the story of
gentrification, build new audiences, and document transitions in its home city
of Chicago. Through collaborative collecting strategies, the Field is
positioned to forge a more inclusive, dialogic future for the city.
Scholarly literature & works cited
Appadurai, A. (1986). The social life
of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Berger, A. A.
(2009). What objects mean. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Jacobs,
J. (1992 [1961]). The Life and Death of
Great American Cities. New York, NY:
Vintage Books.
Ochs,
E. and Kremer-Sadlik, T. (2013). Fast-Forward
Family: Home, Work and Relationships in Middle-Class America. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
[2] See http://fieldmuseum.org/happening/exhibits/opening-vaults-wonders-1893-world%E2%80%99s-fair, accessed 5/1/2014.
[3] See https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/decorative_arts/period_rooms/ for more information. Accessed 4/25/14.
[4] As an example, see Bill Rankin’s map of Chicago at http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots
[5] A recent project run by anthropologist Elinor Ochs at
UCLA, entitled “Fast Forward Family,” documented the homes of middle class
Americans in Los Angeles, using archaeological and linguistic anthropological
approaches and unique documentary techniques.
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